Despite the name, Scotch tape wasn’t invented by the Scottish. It was invented by a college dropout named Richard Drew from Minnesota who worked for a small sandpaper company founded in 1902 called Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, later known as 3M. The name “Scotch” itself has an origin story almost as interesting as the invention of Scotch tape.

26 November 2014

Twelve people and 10 days: That’s how long the artist collective Numen / For Use says it took to create a cellophane jungle gym inside this gallery in Paris, where visitors can crawl inside their milky, transparent network like spiders on a web. How much tape did they use? About 44km.

3 September 2014

How many laps of a roll of tape do you usually need to find the starting edge with your fingernail? Three? Four? You won’t even need fingernails with with this clever roll of electrical tape that features a wavy double-stripe pattern making the starting edge impossible to miss — all you need to do is spot the break in the stripes.

31 March 2014

Japanese artist Ei Wada, who was born in 1987, belongs to a generation that spent middle school feverishly poring over cassettes to make mix tapes — until, of course, they were quickly outmoded by CDs, and then MP3s. Now, Ei makes art using the outmoded technologies he grew up with.

22 February 2014

If there’s one animal that’s inspired endless scientific research — it’s the gecko. The lizard’s ability to seemingly defy gravity and walk on walls has resulted in robots that can repair spaceships in flight, and now maybe even self-cleaning reusable sticky tape.

5 December 2013

There’s prbably very few of us who’ve put much thought into what kind of tape we use to wrap a gift — after all, choosing the paper is hard enough. But there’s a small subset of the population who couldn’t possibly consider giving a gift that wasn’t flawlessly wrapped. And it’s those folks who will be ecstatic to discover this Notchless dispenser that cuts clear adhesive tape without leaving that telltale zig-zag pattern on the edges.

30 October 2013

It’s joked that duct tape can be used to fix almost anything. But a new product called FiberFix might very well be the only tool you’ll ever need for emergency repairs. And the secret is its special resin adhesive that hardens stronger than steel as it cures.

15 June 2013

Any task requiring the use of clear tape would be a lot easier if you could snatch a strip of the sticky stuff with just one hand. And while there have been many complicated contraptions that promise exactly that functionality, Black+Blum have found a simpler approach that takes advantage of that perpetual force known as gravity.

9 April 2013

So you’ve got yourself a car that needs lifting, and you’ve secured an industrial crane for the job. But did you also remember to get a giant harness for the lift? Probably not. Don’t worry though, as long as you can scrounge a few rolls of cellophane packing tape, you’re good to go.